Gareth Jones, Chief Operating Officer at SNP Group: “Finance will always benefit greatly from a fully integrated ERP system”

Through his 30 years of working across finance and enterprise – he spent the first 14 years of his career as a profit accountant for a national supermarket in the UK – Gareth Jones has a grounded understanding of how large operations run. And perhaps more valuably, how they keep pace with modern innovation. Now, as Chief Operating Officer at SNP Group, he oversees programme delivery across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, using his experience to deliver strong results for high-profile clients such as Shell, Coop UK and Illovo Sugar. 

Having lived ERP from both the customer and partner side, Gareth understands how deeply these systems can reach into an organisation. For him, the key is alignment – not just of the technology, but of the people bringing it to life and those who seek to benefit from it. “It’s always important that you understand what the programme means for the company,” Gareth explained, “it’s critical to have solid ways of working between all parties.”

But with that depth and impact also comes risk, which Gareth has seen firsthand. Poorly planned or governed implementations risk not only slow progress but complete programme failures. In our interview, Gareth pointed to what he sees as the three greatest threats to a successful ERP programme: scope creep, poor governance and corner cutting on resourcing. For a successful implementation, all of these need to be taken seriously. As Gareth succinctly notes: “if you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out”.

Even with the best technology, however, Gareth believes that the true determining factor for whether ERP becomes transformational or disruptive is the people. “If people aren’t appropriately trained to understand how best to use the ERP system,” he said, “you run the risk of business operations being interrupted.” 

With decades of lived experience on both sides of the board, it should come as no surprise that Gareth’s views are so vehement. So, to get the full picture, we first asked him to reflect on where that journey started and how it led to his position today.

Can you tell us about your role and your experience with ERP systems?

In my current role I’m responsible for Programme Delivery across all programmes within the NEMEA region, which includes employees, the customers that we work for, and ensuring that we deliver a quality service that produces the required outcome that our customers expect.

Managing the team is a fundamental part of the role, ensuring that I have a happy workforce with the required skills to perform the job. 

I work closely with the Managing Director and the SNP Leadership team on the strategic direction of the company, making sure that we meet the changing needs of our customers, and implement the constantly changing technical advancements of our toolset. As well as future-proof the business so that we can scale to meet the required demand.

I’ve delivered ERP transformation programmes for many companies, and it’s always important that you understand what the programme means for the company, which often allows them to drive efficiency measures, scale to meet future plans, simplify their technology landscape and meet their customer and shareholder demands.

My experience includes being on the customer side working with partners to deliver programmes, and as a partner working with customers to deliver, and in both situations it’s critical to have solid ways of working between all parties, with appropriate governance and communication. This ensures that everyone pulls in the same direction, issues are dealt with in the correct way, and a more predictable outcome is delivered.

How do ERP systems help businesses become more agile and data driven?

ERP systems provide businesses with a platform where their transactions can flow from start to finish in a controlled, auditable, structured fashion, where different systems talk to each other seamlessly, and manual intervention is kept to an absolute minimum.

Businesses can become more agile and data-driven with an ERP system that gives them a structured way in which master data is stored, created and maintained, avoiding duplication of data and excessive maintenance practices.

Having poor data quality, particularly for information on customers, vendors and suppliers, can result in missed sales opportunities, poor payment practices and reputational damage.

Instead, an ERP system which holds quality master data and processes transactions in a structured fashion can lead to valuable insights into product performance, seasonal trends, competitor and promotional impacts, vendor performance, and many other areas. This allows organisations to make strategic, data-driven decisions that will have a positive business impact now and in the future.

Accurate forecasting is another benefit, which helps organisations to plan stock holding strategies, production capacity and resource requirements. This will ultimately give businesses a competitive edge over their competitors, which will allow them to react to changes in the market quicker, and secure their future prospects.

Are there any specific industries or business functions where ERP creates the most impact?

From a business function perspective, finance will always benefit greatly from a fully integrated ERP system, because financial transactions can flow seamlessly through the business landscape. The system will seamlessly bring together various departments such as operations, procurement and finance, and those with the right levels of authorisation to move a transaction through to the next step efficiently. 

Possible bottlenecks can be tackled quickly and easily as there is also complete transparency. Any processes where the transactions are blocked or stuck can be identified quickly allowing the appropriate people to follow up and understand the reason for any delay.

Finance can also have a real-time view of debtors and creditors, which will help them manage the business cash flow and any borrowings that they may have

From an industry perspective, FMCG businesses greatly benefit from an integrated ERP system as they often have large complex supply chain functions and are moving high volumes of low value goods across broad networks.

I’ve worked with several large food retailers who rely heavily on accurate forecasting systems, such as SAP F&R (Forecasting & Replenishment) which drives their full store and warehouse replenishment process. Real-time, detailed product information is required so that daily orders to vendors can be created, products arrive at either distribution centres, for onward allocation quickly, or direct to stores just in time to meet customer demand.

This “just in time” approach in the food industry is essential to maximise the product shelf life and minimise loss to the business. All of this can only work if an organisation’s ERP system has the necessary master data and is integrated to the various systems that manage the end-to-end supply chain.

What are the most common reasons ERP implementations fail or fall short ?

There are several areas which can cause problems on an ERP implementation, which may ultimately result in delays or programme failures in the worst-case scenario. Organisations must work closely with trusted vendors and integration partners to overcome these common pitfalls.

• Scope Creep – Allowing a scope of work to constantly change on a programme will result in delays, frustration and pressure amongst the different teams, additional complexity and additional cost. With an upfront agreed scope on an ERP implementation you have a solid foundation for the standard cycles of Design, Build, Test and Deploy and keep everyone honest on the timeline. 
• Governance – After putting the effort in during the early part of the programme to define scope, appropriate governance then needs to be in place to manage change controls going forward and reduce the impact of any changes. Each potential change should be impact assessed by the relevant parties, so that the impact on the overall programme can be understood, and the appropriate decision made. Quality gate checkpoints should also be put in place at the key stages to help ensure expectations are being met and outcomes are measured at the appropriate times before advancing to the next stage. 
• Resourcing – The cost of resources is usually the biggest consideration on an ERP implementation, whether it be on the customer side or a third party. By not having the appropriate skills at the right time, delays are likely, as well as critical issues being identified too late. Cutting corners on resources with the necessary skills and experience can result in higher costs further down the line, so proper resource management processes are important and should factor into all aspects of planning.

Publishing clear entry and exit criteria that define the beginning and end of implementation phases, deliverable content and formats, and appropriate evidence for such things as unit test and integration testing will ultimately help workload and resources to be managed tightly.

When migrating, do organisations tend to underestimate the challenge of data migration? If so, how can you mitigate against that?

From my experience, virtually all businesses have underestimated the challenge of data migration, and usually end up playing catch up, or accepting that their new system might not be as “shiny” as they originally expected. As the saying goes, if you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out.

Poor data migration generally stems from the fact that most businesses don’t see the value of investing in good data management processes as part of their BAU (Business as usual) organisations and have little or no ownership regarding the different data domains (e.g. product, finance, marketing etc.). Without having established processes regarding governance, creation of new data and archiving, an ERP system’s value can easily be eroded and will make any future upgrades or transformations much more complex and time consuming.

To mitigate this, a business should invest the appropriate time ahead of an ERP implementation or upgrade, so as to address as much of the poor data quality as possible, which covers master data and transactional data (such as ageing open items that need to be closed down).

Thereafter, organisations need to ensure that each data domain has a suitable owner ahead on an ERP implementation, who will be responsible for driving data quality. These owners should be provided suitable data experts from the business to support mapping and validation activities, as well as working with other business functions to ensure that shared data implications are understood and agreed.

In all, at the start of implementing an ERP system, it’s important that the expectations regarding the data migration part of the programme are understood and communicated to the necessary people. If everyone is involved from the start, the possibility of scope creep should be reduced and result in a highly repeatable process which can be fine tuned to optimise timings and data accuracy for the entire transformation project.

What role do you see AI and machine learning playing in ERP in the near future ?

ERP is already seeing many benefits from AI and machine learning and this is only set to increase in the future. AI has turned ERP systems into intelligent, proactive systems which can predict outcomes, automate decision making and optimise processes. Today, ERP systems are no longer passive record keeping tools and instead they strategically guide businesses using real-time insights and adaptive intelligence.

But whilst companies aspire to autonomous or agentic AI, the promise does come with a caveat – they are going to need an ERP system with good quality data, with a high degree of integration and harmony across the organisation. AI is built on data. The more data we gather the sharper predictions of consumer behaviour or market dynamics will become in the future, allowing business leaders to make better, more informed decisions faster, but only if the data quality is high.

Fragmented legacy systems, inconsistent master data and disconnected data silos will continue to form a barrier to AI in the future. If an organisation’s data is messy, inconsistent or inaccessible then AI will stall, and the outcomes will also be messy. Companies will need to invest increasingly more in the discipline of data readiness. Emphasis will need to be placed on building a solid data foundation in terms of data quality, governance, architecture, integration, security and compliance in order for businesses to benefit from the true value of AI.

How important is Change Management in ERP projects, and what best practice have you seen work well?

ERP systems will always need people to operate part of the process, so ensuring that your business teams understand the change that’s coming is essential for the ongoing operations of the business and success of the ERP integration. If people aren’t appropriately trained to understand how best to use the ERP system, and what’s different from what they did before, then you run the risk of business operations being interrupted as people don’t know how to run the basic processes and solve any issues that may arise.

There are many training tools available nowadays, such as SAP Enable Now, which not only help train users in advance of them moving to a new system, but also provide real-time interactive training solutions that can help users while they are performing their daily tasks.

I’ve seen many companies who understand the importance of change management, but the best implementation I saw was when working for a large sugar manufacturer in South Africa, who were deploying a new S/4HANA system to their main manufacturing plants in countries such as Tanzania and Zambia. The change management teams in these countries established comprehensive change networks which covered each of the business process areas, with Change Champions leading each team. Through regular communication and engagement, they were able to monitor the change activities and ensure that users were kept updated on how things were progressing.

As the organisation got closer to user acceptance testing (UAT) and Go Live they held big events to celebrate the changes, which brought all of the teams together with singing, dancing and a big Braai (BBQ). This approach brought lots of attention and excitement to the ERP programme and increased the buy in from the business users. 

If you could give one piece of advice to a CIO about to embark on an ERP project, what would it be?

It’s difficult to give a single piece of advice to a CIO about to embark on an ERP project, but my advice would cover the preparation aspects. CIOs and their organisations need to be clear on what they want from the new system compared to what they have currently. Know which areas need to be improved, which areas work fine, and what benefits can be expected from the new system.

This should help CIOs thinking about what they’re aiming for, how long it should take to get there, what they need to focus on in advance of the project (such as data cleansing) and what resources they’ll need to make the project a success.

All this information will then help organisations to craft an RFP proposal which is clear for potential partners and allow them to compare and contrast the merits of each proposal and hopefully make the right decision for their business.

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